Background
Since settling on the title for this keynote address some weeks ago, I have had considerable difficulties coming to terms with it. I now realise that my difficulties stemmed largely from the fact that I am neither an IT expert nor an educationalist.
As a career civil service administrator for the past 25 years or so, and as Secretary-General of the University Grants Committee for most of the last ten, I can lay claim to some understanding of the Hong Kong system in general, and the higher education sector in particular. But my understanding of higher education is mainly from the point of view of policy and administration rather than the heart of the educational enterprise itself, namely teaching, research and service.
Who was I therefore, I kept asking myself, to comment on whether the Hong Kong higher education institutions are rising to the challenge of e-Education. But then, I thought, why should ignorance, or at least inadequate understanding, stop me from commenting - it doesn't seem to hinder politicians.......
A few years ago, when - and probably because - I had even less knowledge of higher education than I do now, I prepared a background paper for the UGC's review of the development of higher education. I called the paper, with at least some appreciation of the limitations of my knowledge of the subject: "Some thoughts on the implications of the IT revolution for higher education in Hong Kong".
In that paper I attempted to address the potential impact of IT on:
- the nature of higher education institutions
- teaching and learning
- access
- quality assurance
- productivity
- faculty evaluation and rewards
- research and publication
Implications
Nature of higher education institutions
The even greater opportunities offered by the Internet to prepare and deliver educational materials and services "anywhere anytime" present real challenges for traditional universities and other place-specific higher education institutions. The appearance of virtual universities and on-line courses offered by established institutions, many as commercial for-profit ventures, questions the established paradigms of the educational enterprise. We shall be hearing more about one such venture from Glenn Jones, founder of the Jones International University, tomorrow. Another famous (or infamous) one is the University of Phoenix, the head offices of which I had the pleasure of visiting a year or so ago, and whose development of degree and professional upgrading courses available on-line and part-time for working adults has ruffled a few feathers in the US higher education establishment.
But this is not that new. The slogan 'education anywhere anytime' was used first, I believe, in connection with open and distance education provided via earlier technologies including the postal service, television and radio, etc. What is perhaps new now is the incredible range and potentially global reach of that provision. The challenge facing traditional universities is whether they are prepared to learn, as the distance education universities have learnt, to modify their administrative and pedagogical practices to fit the new paradigm.
Teaching and learning
In terms used subsequently in the UGC's review report published in 19962, I suggested that IT applications would affect educational processes in three main ways: as productivity aid, for enrichment of content and as facilitator for student-initiated learning.
A brief aside:
The other day I watched my 18 year old son play Tomb Raider II for a couple of hours. He was engrossed, focussed and highly motivated to learn (and substantially better at it than I am). I said that I hoped he brought the same level of dedication and concentration to his studies at university. He looked at me witheringly and replied: "No chance - not until the teaching and study materials are as well-produced and interesting as this is anyway".
This is just one of aspect of the challenge to the processes for teaching and learning in our higher education institutions represented by "e-Education". Are teachers ready to put their whole heart and soul into creating IT-enabled learning materials which attract and engross our young students and make studying a truly enjoyable activity? Are institutions prepared to invest in the facilities and the training and staff development that will be required to enable faculty to make full use of the benefits of the technology without being overwhelmed by it?
Access
In my paper I referred to the need for a more flexible system of higher education allowing people to dip in and out of education and periodically update their knowledge. This was also reflected in the UGC's review report and I note that the Education Commission's recent consultation document on its review of the Hong Kong education system also refers to the importance of developing a system which encourages and supports life-long learning.
We are not alone in wishing to encourage the development of Hong Kong as a "learning society" - similar sentiments were expressed in the report of the UK's National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Report http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/) and more recently in the report of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities in the US (http://www.nasulgc.org/Kellogg/Kellogg.htm).
The Internet and other forms of telecommunications can make higher and continuing education available to a much wider range of people who would otherwise not have the opportunity either at all or to a much more limited extent. This is, of course, not all that is required to encourage a positive attitude to life-long learning in our young people, but it certainly helps.
Meanwhile, the challenge posed by overseas education providers beaming courses and other higher education services into Hong Kong is certainly real, but the threat can be turned into an opportunity if our institutions develop a more regional and international outlook, and compete in the massive and growing market for education worldwide. In her presentation tomorrow morning, Diana Oblinger will quote a pretty stunning statistic, namely that the worldwide academic market will grow from $24 billion to over $2,000 billion in the next decade. Hong Kong must surely try to get a piece of that action?!
I have so far concentrated on widening access, but there are other aspects of access which also deserve institutional attention. They are to do with equity and parity of access to technology, and the technical aspects of access: whether there is enough bandwidth, whether there are enough modem lines for students to dial in, etc. I look forward to discussions of these issues later in the Symposium.
Quality assurance
"If campuses become electronic metaphors housed in multiple institutions, who sets the standards? Who grants the degree? What kind of degree?" These questions posed in an article in the education environmental scanning journal "On the Horizon" some years ago3 remain legitimate concerns that still need to be addressed regarding the quality assurance of courses and qualifications offered over the Internet.
The particular challenge of transnationally delivered education services has also engaged us in Hong Kong for some years. So far our response has been the Non-Local Higher and Professional Education (Regulation) Ordinance - an instrument that is as limited as it is unmemorably titled - and active participation in the development of an international approach to quality assurance of transnational education through the Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE).
As I said at the GATE Conference in Paris last year, "this is not ¡K.. a matter of protecting local education providers or putting up barriers to trade in education services. It would clearly be contrary to what Hong Kong stands for in other areas of trade in goods and services for us to seek to impose such invisible trade barriers. Legitimate competition on the basis of equivalent standards of provision is welcomed. However we also wish to protect our consumers from "cowboy" operations and "diploma mills". We therefore support the efforts of GATE to establish international standards and validation systems to achieve this end."4
On a smaller scale, how can institutions ensure that their Web-based courses for their local students will be subject to the same rigorous review as their conventional teaching has undergone in the last few years?
Productivity
The application of information technology would appear to offer opportunities to revamp cost structures and gain efficiencies, without sacrificing educational quality. Electronic storage of, and networked access to, library resources is one obvious area where much has been done, but more could be achieved.
Meanwhile, there has been an expectation in all areas of corporate activity, not just higher education, that the advent of information technology would improve productivity and achieve cost savings. This has yet to be borne out in practice, however. The application of IT and telecommunications technology in the higher education setting requires considerable input of staff time and effort to be effective. Institutions would be prudent to draw up a blueprint well in advance to prepare for their implementation.
Faculty evaluation and rewards
It seems inevitable that the use of information technology will change how many academics work. It appears that new guidelines and models for institutional policies and practices will need to be developed for the evaluation of staff using technology. Similarly new guidelines will need to be formulated for peer review and evaluation of teaching, scholarship, and service that integrate the use of information technology. Perhaps we will see institutions already offering best teacher awards extending their award schemes to cover the "best virtual tutor" a few years from now?
Research and publication
The Internet provides a rich repository of information which can greatly facilitate research in many areas. It also offers the possibility of an alternative to traditional academic publishing, through the development of electronic journals and mailing lists, some of which already are moderated.
The above can only represent part of the picture. I have not, for example, mentioned anything about the ramifications of "e-Education" in terms of the copyright and intellectual property issues raised by widespread access to course material, etc on the web. This will, I assume, be addressed by Stephen Selby and Stephen Lau in their panel on Day 3 of the Symposium at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Quo Vadis
In any event, the opportunities and challenges in the use and application of the latest information and telecommunications technologies in higher and continuing education are apparently limited only by the imagination of those concerned.
To what extent, then, have Hong Kong's higher education institutions been grasping those opportunities and rising to those challenges? In the remainder of this paper I shall attempt to give a brief overview of some of the new initiatives being taken by departments, units and individual colleagues in the UGC-funded institutions. To what extent these initiatives can be covered by the term "e-Education" , I must leave to others, better qualified than I, to judge.
This overview is inevitably incomplete, but will, I hope, give some idea of the diversity of the initiatives being taken here. I am sure more will emerge through the presentations later in this Symposium, to which I look forward with eager anticipation.
Web-based courses
More and more courses are now being delivered via the Web in all the UGC-funded institutions. Some interesting examples are to be found at:
Generally such web-based courses still mostly comprise downloadable lecture notes, administrative announcements, recommended links, some staff and student pages. Their bulletin boards/forums are usually very quiet with few contributors - as is, regrettably, the UGC's own Higher Education Discussion Forum on the UGC web (http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/ugc/forum/forum.htm), incidentally. It seems that Hong Kong students, like academics who read the UGC forum, are too busy or do not bother.
There are, however, exceptions.
CityU's Department of Linguistics' Website Management Programme http://www.ctlwmp.cityu.edu.hk/wmp/wmp2.htm) offers a nice range of on-line resources and interactive facilities, with active student participation.
Many of the institutions have purchased wyswyg web authoring tools to help non-computing teachers to develop courses. The most popular one is WebCT. This is a product of the University of British Columbia that is now used world-wide by 600 universities in 37 countries. Here at HKU, the Computer Centre introduced it to the academic staff two years ago and now over 100 courses are delivered at least partly via the Web
Outreach models
Similarly, departments which have looked beyond Hong Kong's boundaries and reached out to overseas institutions have done well. HKU Architecture's joint teaching of a Virtual Design Studio course with others in the US and Europe is a good example.
A more recent and exciting case, about which Dr Peter Davies will be speaking later today, is the Virtual School of Biodiversity, which is a collaboration between HKU, Nottingham University, the Natural History Museum of London and the Biodiversity consortium supported by the UK's Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP).
Student feedback devices
HKUST's Personal Response System (PRS) is a tool for enhancing learning in class. It promotes instructor-student and student-student interaction in class and encourages shy students to participate in class learning. It helps to create a lively learning atmosphere and serves as an aid for students to synthesize and integrate information and experiences into knowledge.
HKU's WebSET is a do-it-yourself automated system for on-line student evaluation of teaching.
Resources centres
There are now resource centres set up in all of the institutions to help staff interested in becoming Web teachers. For example, HKUST has established a Centre for Enhanced Learning and Teaching (CELT). PolyU has set up a new Multimedia Innovation Centre to handle that role and outside product development work as well. The HKIEd has established a Hypermedia and Self-learning Centre as a virtual centre of interactive hypermedia resources for self learning. In HKU, the resource centre role is split between the Computer Centre and Centre for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT).
PolyU's recently opened Global Virtual Design Studio is equipped with the latest interactive virtual imaging technology. The Studio offers multi-purpose, multi-functional and multi-media facilities custom-built for research, consultancy and student use. With an Onyx2 supercomputer and other state-of-the-art facilities, users can visualize in an immersive environment and share exactly the same audio-visual experience simultaneously with their counterparts at leading design institutions around the world.
The Studio is linked up with many overseas academic institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, to enable participation in the global design revolution through video-conferencing and the exchange of spatial data.
UGC-funded projects
HKUST's Cyberschool of Information Technology, a joint venture between HKUST, Cable & Wireless HKT and IBM China/Hong Kong Ltd, recently opened by President Woo Chia-wei and my Chairman, Dr Alice Lam, is an on-line learning infrastructure. It utilizes web-based course delivery and multimedia technologies that will enable students to access from campus or at home a wide range of tertiary-level information technology (IT) courses over a broadband intranet.
This is actually one of a number of projects directly supported by the UGC. A total of $407 million has been awarded as Teaching Development Grants or other supplementary earmarked grants to support some 80 projects over the past 6-7 years. Many of these grants have been used to develop web-based courses and other innovative approaches to, and resources for, teaching and learning via the web. Other examples are:
The Consortium for the Promotion of Teaching Skills and Technology
English language learning and teaching on the Internet : Establishing a Hong Kong-wide Virtual' Language Centre in a World Wide Web environment
Teaching Effectively in Higher Education: Production of a Multimedia Package
CIVCAL - A Computer Aided Teaching-Learning Project for Students in Civil Engineering
OACES: Online Academic Communication Environment and Support - Toward Collaborative and Interactive Education Practice on the Web
The importance of infrastructure
The preceding brief overview has deliberately focussed on initiatives in enhancing teaching and learning through the use of IT and the web. However the institutions have also been taking up the challenge of "e-Education" in other areas.
As mentioned earlier, the application of information technology would appear to offer opportunities to revamp cost structures and gain efficiencies, without sacrificing quality, through for example electronic storage of, and networked access to, library resources. I recently attended a presentation on the California State University (CSU) system's Journal Access Core Collection project, a new combined academic journal subscription and management system providing electronic access to core journals in full text for all 21 CSU campuses. All very fine, but it still only provides access to a limited range of periodicals, albeit major ones, and also only scratches the surface of the problem of increasing costs of journal subscriptions, electronic or otherwise.
Meanwhile the Joint University Libraries Advisory Committee here in Hong Kong has been pursuing the possibility of joint purchasing of electronic resources as well as combined computerised cataloguing for some years, with UGC funding support. While it is now possible to search the resources of all the UGC libraries and arrange inter-library loans from your desktop, progress towards real integration of all university library resources is still rather slow.
Incidentally, I should just briefly like to mention the infrastructure that is critically important to support all these activities, namely the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network (HARNET) and its electronic links to the outside world and the wider Internet. Dr Ng Nam will no doubt be saying more about this tomorrow, but I would like to use this opportunity to make the point that the UGC and the universities cannot go on supporting the commercial traffic which takes up increasing amounts of the available bandwidth by the day. The networks and connections to support this are a vital part of Hong Kong's infrastructure as a global business and financial centre, as a centre for innovation and technology, as a "cyberport" and so on. The Government needs to consider investing heavily here, as much as it invests in roads, railways, port and airport facilities.
Evaluation and rewards: redressing the balance
As regards faculty evaluation and rewards, I am assured that the institutions do try to accord equivalent standing for performance appraisal purposes to initiatives and innovations leading to new approaches to teaching and learning. However, I guess it will take a long time to convince the average junior lecturer or assistant professor that their track record in research is not much more important for their career advancement than developing a truly imaginative and exciting web-based learning module for one of their department's courses.
The UGC is attempting to redress this balance through the Research Assessment Exercise and other means (including the Teaching and Learning Quality Process Reviews as well as the Teaching Development Grant programme mentioned earlier). A couple of weeks ago we held a two-day workshop - at least it was supposed to be two-day until Typhoon York closed Hong Kong down completely on the second day! - with participation of three senior representatives from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The aim of the workshop was to prepare the 12 RAE panels to evaluate submissions equally in the four Boyer categories of scholarship : the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application and the scholarship of teaching. This is another ground-breaking initiative for which Hong Kong's higher education system is becoming world-renowned.
Conclusion
I hope this keynote address has achieved two purposes. First, to give you an indication of some of the good things being done by colleagues in the UGC-funded institutions to embrace the challenges and opportunities presented by "e-Education" and whet your appetite for the later sessions when some of these projects will be presented in greater detail. And second, to encourage even more innovation and creativity in the use of the web to enrich the educational enterprise here and elsewhere.
We in Hong Kong have a great advantage with well-resourced institutions (short-term enforced funding reductions notwithstanding) and excellent IT facilities and infrastructure. Let's use it.
